Books about Zwirner from Amazon.com

Published on the occasion of his fifth solo exhibition at David Zwirner gallery in New York, Even the Ghost of the Past presents new work by the influential young Canadian artist Marcel Dzama--including a DVD of original short films. A favorite among the art, literary and indie music scenes, Dzama is best known for his figurative compositions of pen and watercolor on manila-colored paper. Bearing a characteristic palette of muted browns, greys, greens and reds, Dzama's drawings are populated by an expansive cast of human, animal and hybrid characters. In recent years, Dzama has extended his practice to include work in multiple media. A recent exhibition, for example, transformed the gallery into an odeum of imagination, replete with drawings, sculptures, dioramas and films. Featuring an interview with the artist by filmmaker Spike Jonze and designed in collaboration with the artist as two hardback books twin-bound into one with a custom drawing on the cover, Even the Ghost of the Past is destined to become an instant collector's item.
Marcel Dzama was born in 1974 in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. A co-founder of the Winnipeg-based Royal Art Lodge collective, he currently lives in New York City..
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Following upon Neo Rauch's 2007 exhibition at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, this exquisite catalogue presents new work by the artist, as seen in his fourth solo exhibition at David Zwirner gallery in the spring of 2008. (The New York Times' Karen Rosenberg deemed the new work "more of a Fellini film than a costume drama," by comparison.) One of his generation's most influential painters, Rauch continues the rich tradition of Leipzig figurative painting. Transforming typical industrious scenes into veritable dreamscapes, he transports viewers to a deeply personal and enigmatically symbolic universe. Rauch does not rely on existing imagery or models for his paintings, and while some begin as tiny sketches, he works his imagined scenes directly onto the canvas. He likens his process to reading a novel, with the paintings unfolding as surprisingly for their maker as for any viewer. Springing from dreams and shaped by experience both past and present, Rauch's instinctive imagery and automatic approach exceed straightforward Surrealist concerns and restrictive artistic practice.
Neo Rauch was born in 1960 in Leipzig, East Germany, where he continues to live and work..
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Since the late 1970s, as a pioneer of Southern California underground culture, Raymond Pettibon has radically blurred the boundaries of "high" and "low." His obsessively worked drawings draw freely from myriad sources that span the cultural spectrum. The resulting highly poetic constructions function as acute and authentic reflections of contemporary society. Since September 11, 2001, Pettibon's focus has grown increasingly political--as evidenced by his 2006 and 2007 exhibitions at Regen Projects in Los Angeles and David Zwirner gallery in New York, respectively. This probing catalogue of those shows includes a text by the esteemed contemporary art historian Benjamin Buchloh.
Raymond Pettibon was born in 1957 in Tucson, Arizona, and currently lives and works in Venice, California. He received his B.A. from the University of California at Los Angeles in Economics. A self-taught artist, he received the Bucksbaum Award following his participation in the 2004 Whitney Biennial, and the 2001 Wolfgang Hahn Prize from the Museum Ludwig, Cologne, Germany. Pettibon has recently been the subject of expansive surveys in Germany, Austria and Spain. Included in the 52nd Venice Biennale in 2007, he is widely considered one of the most influential contemporary artists working today..
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In Flowers, Welling continues to work with photograms of flowers, a project he began in 2004. The most recent Flowers are larger in scale and have a greater range of colors than those in past works. To produce these works, Welling placed small, irregularly-shaped color filters behind the negative as he printed the images. In an interview with the artist, novelist/critic Lynne Tillman notes that these flowers argue for a present-ness of the photograph. Rather than pointing to a specific moment in the past, these nearly-abstract images encourage the viewer to discover new meanings while in the presence of the work..
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The Course of Human History Personified, is borrowed from Dante and recalls both grandiose artistic and literary cycles from the nineteenth century such as the New York Hudson River School artist Thomas Cole s five-painting The Course of Empire of 1836, where nature plays as large a role as humans. In Dzama s art, personification has always been the main leitmotif imagined characters and trees and beasts assume base human characteristics. (Rosenfeld, Jason. From Viewing Human History Through a Unique Lens, 2005).
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Once described by critic Jerry Saltz as "orgies of narrative--Nevada's celebrated Chicken Ranch brothel crossed with Wal-Mart and Kurt Schwitters' Merzbau," the libidinously sprawling installations of Jason Rhoades (1965-2006) met cultural overproduction head-on, with a savage fervor comparable only to that of Rhoades' onetime teacher at UCLA, Paul McCarthy. His work encompassed excess and contradiction: "To juggle the impossible was always an issue throughout my work--to take three objects, like a rubber ball, a chain saw and a live African elephant, and try to juggle," he declared. Rhoades' last project, Black Pussy Soiree Cabaret Macrame, was a series of private social events involving massive sculptural installations in which people walked through a large Los Angeles warehouse filled with Ikea-style shelves containing thousands of "dream catchers," hookahs, camel saddles, chrome trolleys and cowboy hats. Neon signs spelled out various words for female genitalia, and guests were invited to contribute to Rhoades' ongoing cross-cultural compendium of these euphemisms. Evolving to fit each location, this installation, which publicly debuted at Hauser & Wirth in London in 2005, traveled to New York's David Zwirner gallery in November of 2007. Its catalogue was conceived by and designed with the artist prior to his untimely death, and includes a foreword by Kevin West, West Coast Editor of W magazine, and photographs by Joshua White and Alexia Pilat..
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A blue-black topless woman stakes her claim on the Upper East Side. A stripper displays her behind next to six brides posing in a row. A dead man with a bound jaw asks the viewer to confront three blindfolded prisoners and three mysteriously somber children The paintings and drawings collected here demonstrate Marlene Dumas’s enduring fascination with image-making as a force for objectification, and simultaneously express her desire to pry the act of figurative painting loose from that history. Her lushly painted work recalls the immediacy of Expressionism in its gestures, the critical distance of Conceptual art in its idea-driven intensity, and the pleasures of eroticism in both its subjects and its lavishly applied paint. The complexity of Dumas’s conceptual preoccupations is belied by her formal mastery--both command the viewer’s attention, and the chemistry between them makes her one of our most important living figurative painters..
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Much of the seminal 1960s sculpture documented in this catalogue is from Claes Oldenburg’s personal collection and had never been shown until it was gathered on the occasion of the artist's first major historical New York exhibition since his Guggenheim retrospective of 1995. Included are a large selection of objects from The Store; early soft sculptures from The Home; and works related to the Airflow project. Scholars and new initiates alike will enjoy Oldenburg’s earliest riffs on street life (yard-long gym shoes), household objects (plump fabric light switches and toilets) and automobile culture, explored and transformed through innovative manipulations of scale and material into mysterious, formally inventive works that address human experience in modern life. An insightful essay by Julia E. Robinson points to relationships with the work of Daumier, Dubuffet and Manet..
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This exhibition includes a group of new canvases exploring the depiction of mental states through the careful release and withholding of visual and conceptual clues. With a traditional style akin to Baroque and Rococo portraiture and pastoral scenes, Borremans' paintings reside in an uncomfortable place - one that is best understood through introspection rather than imposed rationale. Haunting yet familiar enough to evoke buried memories, Borremans' images are peaceful upon first encounter, yet they intensify and become eerily unsettling after prolonged viewing.

The title Horse Hunting is a metaphor for the attempt to achieve something that is just short of attainable; in this case referring to an artist's creative process as well as that of human nature as a whole. This notion that the desired cannot be realized (or cannot be completely processed from either a physical or spiritual point of view) leaves Borremans' paintings in a transformative and mystified state. Adding to their psychological intensity, the works' lustrous surface of visible brushstrokes, bringing to mind Manet or perhaps Velasquez, are rendered in palettes of diffused, shadowy browns, oranges and grays.

In this exhibition, the paintings fall loosely into three points of view. The "Portraits" feature young male subjects with pensive expressions, cropped in a non-conventional manner to reveal just the head, neck and shoulders, as in passport photographs. These are quasi-anonymous individuals; they are not named or further defined, hence they become versatile forms able to contain a multitude of references, much like political portraits in which the sitter's ideology is embedded (one thinks of Mao Tse-Tung as a historical example). In Portrait (2005), the sitter's eyes, heavy-lidded under an equally heavy brow, seem to impart both arrogance and pity.

The "Bodies" suggest a parallel to Goya's The Third of May (1808) and Manet's The Execution of Maximilian (1867-68). In Borremans' Three Men Standing (2005), two of the three men, who stand in a line against a wall, are cropped at the canvas' left and right edges. A sense of violence - both conceptual and formal - imbue the composition with the feeling of impending terror. In other paintings, subjects lie on the floors of shadowed interiors with eyes closed; we are left to wonder if they are dead or merely asleep.

In other, more allegorical works, Borremans eschews direct associations in favor of an ambiguous absurdity. In The Hare (2005), two young boys, one with hands politely behind his back and the other holding an outstretched hare, gaze down at the animal (which Borremans has lit romantically on its underside) without recognizable intention. In The Appearance (2005), three men stand around a table, hands outstretched and palms up as if in séance, suggesting the otherworldly or vaguely supernatural. It is in these and other small details - the unnoticed eccentricities of human expression - that Borremans' fleshes out his unusual psychological agenda..
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SOMETIMES DOING SOMETHING POETIC CAN BECOME POLITICAL AND SOMETIMES DOING SOMETHING POLITICAL CAN BECOME POETIC, which includes a film in collaboration with Julien Devaux as well as a map of Alys s journey, photocollages, paintings, drawings, and a group of sculptures, was exhibited in part at The Israel Museum in Jerusalem in 2005. The film, which revisits the artist s 1995 work entitled The Leak, shows Alys carrying a dripping can of green paint along the armistice boundary that Moshe Dayan marked on a map with green pencil after Israel s War of Independence ended in 1948. The piece questions the physicality and cultural relevance of the Green Line, its function as a social and spiritual division in the city of Jerusalem, and its role in the Arab-Israeli conflict. With this work, Alys asks: Can an artistic intervention truly bring about an unforeseen way of thinking, or it is more a matter of creating a sensation of "meaninglessness" that shows the absurdity of the situation? Can an artistic intervention translate social tensions into narratives that in turn intervene in the imaginary landscape of a place? Can an absurd act provoke a transgression that makes you abandon the standard assumptions on the sources of conflict? Can those kinds of artistic acts bring about the possibility of change? In any case, how can art remain politically significant without assuming a doctrinal standpoint or aspiring to become social activism? For the moment, I am exploring the following axiom: Sometimes doing something poetic can become political and sometimes doing something political can become poetic. Texts in English, Hebrew, and Arabic..
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